Vacuum cleaner designer takes an innovative route

PASADENA, Calif. — The vacuum-cleaner pitchman was wowing his audience at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena on a recent night. He had done the same the night before at the A+D Museum in downtown Los Angeles, where he talked about the need for constant suction as he vroomed his missile-shaped machine around pointed Pradas and polished Guccis.

At the college he was pelted with questions -- "Where's the bag?" -- and at the museum he was bombarded by intimate confessions -- "I would rather do anything than vacuum." He listened, arms relaxed across his soft denim shirt. He had heard it all before. And he would hear it again, now that he's introducing his $400 invention to the United States after sweeping the markets in Britain, Europe and Japan.

Many people, it seems, want a personal demonstration by the stubborn British inventor who leveraged his family's farmhouse to make a bagless vacuum cleaner that in turn made him a billionaire and the idol of design-minded dreamers.

Inside, the Dyson DC07 relies on cyclones and centrifugal force instead of fans and bags. Outside, the original submarine-yellow upright -- now available in red and purple -- looks more like an educational toy with all of its spiraling working parts exposed. And the marketing campaign behind it is just as elegantly engineered.

A radical departure

To set his vacuum apart from the Hoovers, Royals and Eurekas, James Dyson is showing the vacuum in design school auditoriums and at museums, where applause is long for a smart product and its creator.

Dyson wants to be seen in the same way as Philippe Starck and Michael Graves, who have turned their energies to jazzing up household must-haves for the masses.

He made a name for himself as an industrial designer in the mid-'70s by coming up with the Sea Truck, which moves heavy cargo at high speed across water, and by reinventing the wheelbarrow, using a fat pneumatic balloon instead of a wheel that sinks in soft soil. Those inventions brought in millions -- for others. Then the tinkerer-turned-businessman took over.

Today, in a manner he calls "megalomaniacal," Dyson owns the company that has stamped his name on 10 million uprights and canisters. He watches over its research, manufacturing and marketing. And he's the one who travels the world, explaining why design matters.

Standing at the edge of Art Center's auditorium stage, Dyson talked without notes about the lonely act of inventing, the maddening frustration of keeping "bloodsucking corporate sharks" from stealing a little guy's profitable idea, and the indescribable joy of proving pessimists wrong.

"Creativity is a rare commodity, and designers are far too modest and unassuming," he told the students. "If you don't have control, you have to defer to others. Innovation requires builders, not bean-counters."

"He's inspiring," said Mike Shaub as he and other students huddled in front of Dyson's machine after the hourlong lecture. "He put out a better product and he charges a lot for it. He didn't compromise its design or function to sell it cheaper, which is what we idealists fear we'll have to do in the real world."

James Dyson is a nonconformist who never wears a suit, demands that his staff think illogically and hangs out with his product designers..

A better sweeper

It all started at Dyson's home in Bathford, England. In 1978, the 31-year-old family man was trying to clean up. He pushed a vacuum over the carpet, but it didn't do much more than leave sweeping marks.

He replaced the bag, thinking it was full, but the new bag didn't improve things. He tore the sorry sack apart and found that dust was blocking air from entering it.

What, he wondered, could trap dirt instead of a bag, a mainstay of suction vacuums since 1908 -- and an approach Dyson likens to "an electric fan and a pillowcase on a stick"?

The answer came to him when he saw a 30-foot-tall cyclone sucking bad air out of a sawmill. It was like a tornado at the flip of a switch. If only he could shrink the cyclone down to something that could glide around a floor.

Five years, hundreds of blind alleys and more than 5,000 prototypes later, he came up with a working model that didn't clog or lose suction. "It's simply all about airflow," he said.

Air is sucked inside the main cylinder, and cyclones, acting like hyperactive salad spinners, separate the dirt from it, down to the smallest particle of cigarette smoke. Debris is tossed against the walls of the collection bin, where it's trapped.

While testing his device, Dyson built a transparent bin so he could watch how everything worked, then decided he liked it that way. It not only showed the product in action but made it easy for users to see when it was time to empty it.

"Style develops as the engineering develops," said Dyson, who has seen competitors adopt his bagless approach but not his cyclone technology.

In his talks, he takes his machine apart to show off its smart engineering -- the cable-winder hose, curved motor, angled cleaner head.

Before he even sold his first vacuum in the U.K. in 1993, Dyson decided the way to set it apart from the omnipresent Electroluxes and tony Mieles was to start with the design community. So he wheeled his invention to art schools and found that prestigious museums -- such as Paris' Georges Pompidou Center and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art -- wanted one for their collections.

He kept a tight grip on his advertising as well.

Within two years, Dyson was outselling his competitors 5 to 1 in the U.K.

"Consumers want everyday objects to be beautiful and efficient," said Joseph Rosa, architecture and design curator at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, where an earlier version of the DC07 is in the collection.